Titrations!

...seem to be all we are doing in Chemistry at the moment, but I'm actually ok with it. I love the magical moment when you add one more drop of acid and suddenly your solution reaches a tipping point, changes colour, and you know its concentration. I'm not too keen on associating "magical moments" with chemistry, but it seems the only way to describe it; it's fascinating how we measure chemicals into our glassware, somewhat messily, trying to achieve the equivalent of the pure logic of the equations in our textbooks - and most of the time to our astonishment it works.

It's also nice working in the lab on the top floor; the class starts at 9am and though the sun hasn't yet reached between the other buildings it reaches us up there; by chance you can look out a window and catch a glimpse of the river and a ferry going by.

Now I think of it though, all this general appreciation of our Chem pracs is probably something to do with my doing three titrations in a row which agreed to near-perfection - precisely, 19.8, 19.7 and 19.7 mL. I never expect the numbers to come out quite right in experiments, but it's infinitely satisfying when they do.

Learn Stuff For Free

Here's a pretty comprehensive list of colleges and universities (mostly in the US) which offer course content for free online, such as videos or podcasts of lectures, course notes, exercises, and sample exams. I've never done a full course this way but I've looked at a fair bit of MIT's Biology content out of interest and it was pretty good, both in content quality and production quality. More here than you could ever hope to learn, but it's all for the great price of nine ninety-free, so there's nothing to lose! (Hint hint: uni I am going to be in debt to: you'd better be awesome!)

11 fantastic images of planet earth

These photos are all taken from space and show some phenomena from a point of view we don't usually see - such as my favourite, a total solar eclipse from above. Not a very 'hard science' first post, but hey, it's Friday.

It's also November 2nd, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, so I'm busy pounding the keyboard for purposes other than blogging. This is my 4th year at it, and I'm determined to (finally) write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. No exams to interfere, and no homework I should be doing - it's going well. 2500 words or so, if you're interested ;-)

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

This is a blog for my ramblings about biochemistry. I have finally enrolled in Applied Science at QUT, Brisbane, something which for a while I doubted would ever happen. But amazingly, I chose my first-year units last night (I'm majoring, obviously, in biochem), so it looks like it might be imminent after all. Hurrah! I am terribly excited. I've had a year "off" since school, not something I wanted to do, but I needed to work. The waiting made me both more nervous and more eager to get out of here and start studying. Yes, I like study. Don't tell me I have no life - it says "Geek" right there in the title, doesn't it? Exactly. So if you like biology, biochemistry, and off-topic discussions of scientific method, climate change, evolutionary theory, bunnies, and why ramen is the ultimate food: welcome. It will be fun!